Physical rehabilitative thereapeutic equipment is used to treat a person's body by using physical activity through active, passive or active-assistive range of motion stretching. It is a common problem that healthcare providers want to educate patients on home exercise programs, but need equipment in the home to achieve certain exercises. Because therapy equipment is often expensive, and because an episode of care may only last a few months, most patients do not wish to purchase expensive equipment designed for therapy clinics for their homes. This limits a home exercise prescription to either use items that a patient already has in the home, or that uses items that are expensive to purchase.
An extensive line of inexpensive rehabilitation products exists to provide patients with the tools they need for specific home exercises. At present, one piece of equipment utilized in the vast majority of therapy clinics that does not have an inexpensive home-use counterpart is commonly called a finger ladder. The finger ladder is used to provide therapy to a user's upper extremity such as the shoulder, arm, elbow, wrist, hands and/or fingers.
The prior art has illustrated several clinic versions of the finger ladder. All are mounted to the wall with screws and/or anchors. The high entry level price for these finger ladders, added to their design of requiring permanent mounting, makes them impractical for home use. While many healthcare clinicians prescribe finger walking up the wall with no device at all, the full scope of exercises that can be performed on finger ladders in therapy clinics cannot be performed in the home without one. Accordingly, there exists a need for a method and apparatus that provides an inexpensive and portable home version of finger ladders utilized prevalently in therapy clinics.